AI Tools for the Boardroom

With increasing demands on governance professionals’ time, they’re always looking for  innovative solutions to help them support their boards more effectively. Could artificial intelligence (AI) be the answer?

“AI will have a significant impact on boardroom operations and governance. It’s an opportunity and a challenge that directors need to address proactively.” — Chris Ridd, BoardPro Chair

AI tools designed for board management can streamline processes, enhance accuracy, and provide insights. From automating routine tasks to analyzing data, AI can be an ally for busy governance professionals who support the work of the board.

The potential upside of AI in the boardroom is becoming clearer. But what about the downside? If your board secretary brings forward a proposal to adopt an AI-powered tool for board management, you and your fellow directors need to consider the big picture before taking the plunge. Asking the right questions can help you decide.

In this edition of The Savvy Director, we’ll explore the use of AI tools for board management. Whatever your organization’s size and purpose, understanding the potential impact of AI on your board is important. Let’s dive in and discover how governance professionals can use AI in their work.

AI and Board Management

Governance professionals already use all sorts of tools to manage board operations. These tools might be stand-alone, but quite often they’re part of a board portal — a centralized online hub designed for board directors and administrators to manage meetings, access board documents, communicate with each other, and streamline governance processes. Board portal software is typically cloud-based and accessible through desktop and mobile devices.

Think of AI as a way to turbo-charge these board management tools. AI-powered tools can reduce the administrative burden on governance professionals, allowing them to provide better support to their boards and freeing up their time to focus on higher level governance matters.

Keep in mind that AI tools are meant to be used in conjunction with human expertise and judgment. While AI can be a valuable tool, it’s not a substitute for human judgment and experience.

AI can assist with a wide range of governance-related tasks — some of them are described below.

Summarizing Meetings. AI-powered tools can be used for audio transcription of board meetings. AI is becoming ever more sophisticated at being able to decipher regional accents and dialects and understand conversational context to create a complete and accurate meeting transcript. AI can take this a step further by creating a meeting summary from the transcript.

Preparing Minutes. Using AI to prepare draft board minutes is becoming increasingly popular. AI tools can take a raw transcript or meeting summary and easily turn it into properly formatted draft minutes, ready for human review and approval.

Tracking Action Items. AI can extract action items from a meeting summary to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. The technology helps identify and assign specific actions, set deadlines, generate progress reports, send reminders, and highlight overdue items.

Scheduling Meetings. AI-powered scheduling tools can handle tactical details like finding the meeting date and time that works best for all board members.

Developing Agendas. AI-powered tools can be used to develop meeting agendas that are customized to the board’s needs. Generative AI can analyze previous meetings, ongoing projects, and current priorities to create a draft agenda, suggesting topics, allocating time slots, and identifying supporting documents.

Distributing Material. AI-powered tools can be used to distribute meeting materials, ensuring directors have timely access to all relevant documents before the meeting.

Generating Insights. AI can scan long management reports to generate executive summaries that support board oversight and analyze extensive data to find the strategic insights that support decision-making.

Managing Documents. AI tools can organize and manage corporate records — minutes, resolutions, etc. — to help make them easier to search and retrieve.

Facilitating Communication. AI-powered communication tools such as chatbots and virtual assistants can facilitate seamless communication among directors and between the board and management.

Monitoring Compliance. AI can monitor compliance with laws and regulations such as those related to corporate governance, data privacy, and the environment, providing early warning of potential issues.

The Boardroom Benefits

AI tools have the potential to improve board effectiveness and efficiency in the following ways.

Saving time. AI saves time by automating tasks, enabling instant access to information, streamlining workflows, and improving communication. For instance, AI-generated draft minutes can be in directors’ hands shortly after a board or committee meeting.

Saving money. There’s a potential to reduce costs by reducing manual data entry and streamlining processes. With their time freed up, resources can be re-allocated to other tasks rather than having to hire additional staff. 

Improving accuracy. AI reduces human errors by automating data entry and analysis. It flags anomalies, provides real-time validation, and eliminates manual processing mistakes.

Enhancing memory. AI enhances organizational memory and historical accuracy by securely storing and organizing data, allowing for quick search and retrieval of past documents, meeting minutes, and decisions.

Improving compliance. AI continuously scans for compliance issues, flags potential risks, and provides updates on regulatory changes. AI-driven tools can streamline audit processes and enforce policy adherence.

The Downside

Let’s imagine a scenario where the corporate secretary is making a case that the board should start using AI tools for some of the board management tasks we outlined above. What concerns might directors have before deciding whether to go ahead?

• Cost. Technology is not cheap. There are often one-time costs for implementation and staff training as well as recurring costs like ongoing maintenance and support. When thinking about costs, remember to identify any offsetting savings.
• Security. As boards frequently deal with highly sensitive information, directors will want to know how the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information will be protected.
• Reliability. Reliability is a concern, particularly if the tools being considered are new. Directors may want to know how the tools have been validated, what safeguards are in place, and who is currently using them.
• Ease of use. To make sure that the new technology doesn’t just gather dust, the board’s concerns may include whether the tools are user-friendly and what training and support is provided. Directors may want to see demonstrations and review testimonials.
• Integration. The board may want to know whether the tools being considered are part of an existing portal or suite of products. If they’re stand-alone, directors may have concerns about how well they’ll integrate with existing systems.

These are concerns about the use of AI tools in general. In addition, each specific board management task often comes with its own set of issues. For instance, let’s consider the use of AI to record, transcribe, and summarize meetings and generate minutes. Some specific issues for the board to consider include the following:

• Legal concerns. Even though AI-generated minutes are only a draft subject to board approval, transcription errors and AI “hallucinations” in the draft could be missed and make their way into the official record.
• Board dynamics. Board meetings should be safe spaces where questions, cross talk, and concerns are encouraged. Knowing they’re being recorded may result in directors being reluctant to speak out.
• Functionality. Recording of board meetings comes with risk, such as the likelihood of someone neglecting to wipe all copies once minutes are finalized. One way of dealing with this is to insist that the AI tool come with a default setting to automatically erase audio records once minutes are approved.
• Features. The tool’s ability to deal with varying speech patterns, accents, room acoustics, and hybrid meetings will affect the accuracy of transcriptions. The sophistication of its design will affect the usefulness of meeting summaries and the ability to create minutes in the desired style.
• Consistency. AI morphs by design, so that today’s meeting summary will likely differ from yesterday’s. Even same-day outputs may differ by device.
• Unintended consequences. Manual note-taking focuses the mind and increases recall. If AI is doing the work, people in the meeting may just tune out.
• Blind spots. Audio recording captures words, but it’s blind to a lot of a conversation’s actual meaning - body language, tone, delivery, etc.

“One of the use cases we often hear about is AI tools generating minutes of meetings. While this can be incredibly productive, there are risks involved, particularly around data privacy and bias in decision making. … This is where a professional minute taker may endure as they can understand the nuance of the discussion and make the appropriate decision about what is recorded.” — Chris Ridd, BoardPro Chair

Questions for the Savvy Director

Here are some questions designed to encourage discussion and exploration of the potential benefits and risks of using AI tools for board management. The goal is to ensure the board is fully informed and engaged in the decision-making process.

• What opportunities are there for AI tools to support our board and how will we explore them?
• What are the associated risks and how will we mitigate them?
• What benefits could AI tools provide?
• What concerns do we have about AI tools in the boardroom?
• How can we start small so we can get comfortable with AI?
• Which will serve us better — integration with our board portal software or stand-alone tools?
• How do AI tools align with our governance objectives?
• How do we ensure that using AI tools in the boardroom conforms to our AI policy?
• How will we be trained and supported in using AI tools?
• How will we assess the effectiveness of AI tools?
• How will we ensure that our use of AI is transparent and accountable?
• Will using AI for board management displace any human workers?
• Can we trust AI with our data?

Evaluating AI Options

There’s a growing number of AI tools available to governance professionals. Here are some criteria to help you evaluate them.

• User-friendliness. A user interface that’s easy to use, intuitive, and accessible.
• Integration. Ability to be integrated with other systems and processes.
• Security. Robust security features such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.
• Reliability. A stable system with a track record of proven performance and minimal downtime.
• Cost-effectiveness. A reasonable cost structure that fits with your budget.
• Customization. Features and functionality that can be tailored to your requirements.
• Scalability. The ability to grow and adapt as your needs evolve over time.
• Support. Backed by a strong team with access to technical support, training, and resources.

Your takeaways:

• AI tools for board management can summarize meetings, take minutes, track action items, schedule meetings, develop agendas, and lots more.
• AI tools can free up a governance professional’s time to provide better support to the board. Still, there are risks and concerns for directors to consider.
• Asking great questions helps directors understand and evaluate the potential benefits and risks of using AI for board management.
• When implementing AI in the boardroom, start small. Get comfortable with one or two tools, then slowly add more.
• Make sure that using AI in the boardroom conforms to your AI policy.

Resources:

Caveat about this week’s resources. Most are from board portal software companies – many of which provide excellent background information. Please be aware that DirectorPrep doesn’t endorse or recommend any particular solution.

• AI in the Boardroom. Presented by Boardpro. Australian Institute of Company Directors. October 2024.
• AI in The Boardroom: How AI is Transforming Board Meetings & Governance. Ella Patenall. © Govrn SA.
• Here come the AI point solutions, one of which will write your meeting minutes for you. Jay Shaw and Alan Hewitt. Praxonomy.
• AI in the Boardroom: Transforming Nonprofit Strategy for Greater Impact.The Team at Boardable. © 2024 Boardable.
• AI for Board Minutes - The Good, The Bad, and Tips. Ralph Ward. LinkedIn. June 2024.

Thank you.

Scott

Scott Baldwin is a certified corporate director (ICD.D) and co-founder of DirectorPrep.com – an online membership with practical tools for board directors who choose a growth mindset.

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